There is a general perception that it’s better to hire an external agency to work on your SEO as opposed to building an in-house SEO team. This assumption is far from the truth and in this article I will explain how and why it is better to build and structure your in-house SEO team. Let’s start with the top level explanations of the meaning of in-house SEO team.

What is an in-house SEO Team?

An in-house SEO team is a scenario where you hire full-time SEO professionals to work exclusively on your website alone. Your in-house SEO team has limited to no interaction or dependencies on external SEO agencies. This, of course, very much depends on the level of SEO maturity of your website. The concept of in-house SEO team(s) also applies to SEO agencies because they, too, can decide to in-source their end-to-end SEO capability in-house. So why would an organisation opt to hire an in-house SEO team as opposed to delegating its SEO strategy planning to an external SEO agency? This leads us nicely to the next question.

What are the benefits of having an in-house SEO team?

I have had the opportunity to work as part of in-house SEO teams both on the client and on the agency side, which has given me a wealth of experience. There are a few benefits of hiring an in-house SEO team:

1. Security: Having an in-house SEO team reduces the risk of falling into the trap of bad SEO being done to your website which might result in Google punishing your website for ‘black hat’ SEO. This is because some agencies are only interested in quick wins, without considering that these might have a long term negative impact on your website. This is why I always recommend building your SEO team in-house, as this gives you complete control over your SEO activities. 
2. Internal Communication: One of the main problems of implementing SEO in companies is due to the fractured communication between external agencies and important internal stakeholders like the IT development team. It is extremely easy for in-house SEO team members to just walk up to IT dev team members and collaborate towards implementing technical SEO tasks. It’s even easier for internal SEO team members to request access to internal data which cannot be shared with external SEO agencies. 
3. Reduced Cost: I have worked with large marketing agencies that charge clients anything from $800 to $1500 per day depending on the size of the website. There is a perception that external agencies are expensive because they have expertise that in-house SEO teams don’t have. There is a different side to this assumption, because an in-house SEO team can easily hire someone with agency background. Business leaders often make the mistake of believing that hiring an SEO agency will give them access to SEO tools but in actual fact, in-house teams can buy these SEO tools themselves, and often at a cheaper rate, directly from vendors. The cost of SEO tools should not be the main factor driving your decision on whether or not to outsource your SEO to an agency. 
4. SEO Implementation Speed: The ease of collaboration with important internal stakeholders makes SEO implementation a lot faster for in-house SEO teams. I have seen situations where the implementation of SEO recommendations from external teams is delayed by up to 6 months (?!) due to fractured communication with external SEO agencies. It is also possible to have multiple agencies working on your SEO which makes it difficult to track prioritisation of SEO tasks and further complicates the communication and the execution of your SEO strategy. In-house SEO teams can easily nudge internal stakeholders to speed up SEO task implementation. 

There are pros and cons to the cost benefits of in-house SEO team structure and the next question to consider when structuring your in-house SEO team is:

How much does it cost to build an in-house SEO team?

Whether in-house or agency side, every SEO team needs SEO software for technical SEO, content production and link building. It is significantly cheaper to buy your own in-house SEO tools because you will basically be buying the same tools agencies use, for which they will often charge a premium. There are situations where agencies ‘white label’ SEO tools and resell the same tools to clients as “proprietary SEO tools”. The cost of SEO tools ranges from $600 to $800 per month depending on the size of your website, but you can easily find cheaper tools for $200 per month if you have a very small website. 

Next you need to consider how much it would cost to hire an in-house SEO team. You will ideally need between two to 20 people on your in-house SEO team, depending on the size of your website and the competitiveness of your industry. For startups I recommend hiring a T-shaped SEO consultant like myself, as opposed to building an in-house SEO team. This is a more cost effective approach that saves time and money because it costs around $120,000 to hire an in-house team with all the skills required but you can easily pay half of that to a consultant and still get better results than hiring an agency. Most organisations do not fully in-house their SEO but adopt a hybrid model that offers the best of both worlds. 

Skills you need for when structuring an in-house SEO team

There is the perception that you get more skilled SEO if you decide to outsource your SEO to an SEO agency but people often fail to realise that some of the best SEO teams work in-house. It’s also easy to build an in-house SEO team by hiring people with agency backgrounds. Having said that, you will need to ensure that the people you hire have a mix of the following SEO skills:

• Technical SEO
• Content Production
• Digital PR
• Link Building

How do you structure a successful in-house SEO team?

Usually this function is driven by a Head of SEO or SEO Director and I recommend hiring a seasoned, T-shaped SEO professional with experience of technical, content and link building. This will ensure that every aspect of SEO is covered. Reporting into the Head of SEO are 3 broad skillset groups lead by the:

• SEO Manager (Technical SEO)
• SEO Manager (Content)
• SEO Manager (Link building / Digital PR)

This can then be further extended with the executive/assistant/intern layers, if necessary, as shown in the image.

Different types of in-house SEO teams

There are two options of in-house SEO team structure which are:

• Fully in-house SEO team
• Hybrid in-house SEO team.

Hybrid in-house SEO team is a structure that works well for most small to medium-sized organisations. It’s often difficult to in-house all of your SEO team, which is why most organisations hire SEO consultants on an ad hoc basis to help create a detailed SEO strategy and implementation roadmap. 

I work with companies to save them the cost of hiring expensive in-house SEO team due to my experience across Technical SEO, content, link building and conversion optimisation. If you’d like to discuss your requirements further – please get in touch via email on femi@cxconversion.com or call me on +44 (0)75 6809 1722.

As a business owner or marketing leader, it’s important to understand that digital marketing channels can be grouped into two fundamental categories:

1.     Short-term focused digital marketing channels
2.     Long-term focused digital marketing channels

These are then further subdivided into paid advertising and free organic digital marketing channels. Irrespective of which digital marketing channel(s) you decide to invest in, you need to clarify with your marketing team or agency whether these channels are short term or long term because this will help you understand how much is being wasted on marketing.  

Free Digital Marketing Channels

Digital marketing channels classed as ‘free’ are not actually free, because you still need to invest in hiring the right staff to manage these channels, as well as investing in marketing software tools. The results you get from ‘free’ digital marketing channels are more long-term focused and require patience because it takes time to get traction and ROI on investment in these marketing channels.

Paid Digital Marketing Channels

Paid digital marketing channels will get you instant results from a traffic acquisition perspective but ROI is not guaranteed unless you are targeting the right customer using the right keyword terms. I have seen companies spend as much as £5 million pounds on paid advertising without getting any tangible results because they lacked a focused marketing plan and clear KPIs.

Types of Digital Marketing Channels

The primary purpose of digital marketing channels is to get traffic to your website or encourage customers to visit branches of your physical store locations to buy or pick-up orders. Digital marketing channels come in different shapes and sizes. Here are some of the important strategies and digital marketing channels from a traffic acquisition, retention and conversion perspective:

1.     Content Marketing (production and distribution)
2.     Social Media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others)
3.     Search Engines (Google Ads, Display Advertising and Search Engine Optimisation – SEO)
4.     Email Marketing
5.     Affiliate Marketing
6.     Offline Marketing
7.     Brand Equity (Direct Traffic)

The foundation of getting traffic from digital channels is content production but you see a lot of marketing ‘gurus’ classifying content marketing as a marketing channel. However, content production is actually the foundation of all your digital marketing channels from an acquisition, conversion and retention standpoint. The effectiveness of your marketing strategy depends on the quality, consistency, targeting and distribution of your content across and tailored to digital marketing channels. I will explain this further in the next sections of the article.

Social Media as a Digital Marketing Channel

You can acquire website traffic and build brand awareness from the following social media channels:

1.   Facebook
2.   YouTube
3.   Twitter
4.   LinkedIn
5.   Instagram
6.   Snapchat
7.   Pinterest
8.   Reddit
9.   WeChat
10.  TikTok
11.  Medium
12.  Twitch
13.  WhatsApp
14.  Quora
15.  Meetup
16.  Flickr
17.  Vimeo

You can achieve your customer acquisition, engagement and conversion objectives using different social media platforms but it’s important to understand your customers’ behaviours on these platforms in order to avoid wasting your marketing budget. Business executives often complain that “we tried Facebook and Twitter but didn’t get any conversion”.

On the other extreme you see successful ecommerce businesses making huge profit from using social media platforms. You need to understand your customers and how to connect with them on social media if you want to increase business results using social media platforms.

Some social media platforms like LinkedIn will bring customers to your website that are more business-oriented, while platforms like Facebook will generate less B2B oriented traffic. Whatever your business venture, you want to identify the best social media platforms that align with your target customer, business objectives because that’s the channel that will generate high converting customers.

Search Engines

Another important digital marketing channel is the search engine which is unarguably the highest source of traffic to your website. Google search is the most effective engine and the platform also owns YouTube, which is the second largest global search engine. Listed below are some of the most popular search engines:

1.     Google
2.     Bing
3.     Yahoo
4.     Baidu
5.     AOL
6.     Ask.com
7.     DuckDuckGo
8.     Yandex

As a digital marketing channel, search engines send traffic to your website in two fundamental ways:

•       Paid search traffic also known as Google Ads
•       Organic search traffic which you can manage through SEO or search engine optimisation. 

Paid search is when you pay search engines like Google to get customers to your website. This is a pay-as-you-go approach because you will only get what you pay for and Google will stop sending traffic to your website if you are not able to afford that traffic. The same applies to YouTube, you can invariably pay to get traffic from YouTube videos to your website.

Paid search as a digital marketing channel is very expensive but also very effective if you have the budget for it. Make sure you are targeting the right keywords and also that you are sending the traffic to the correct landing pages. 

SEO is another effective and cost-efficient digital marketing channel that is important if you are keen on reducing your customer cost per acquisition. To get traffic to your website from search engines without spending a lot of money on Google ads, you need to create very good content which will get picked up by those search engines and then be shown to your target customer. This is how you get free traffic to your website through SEO.

Affiliate Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel 

Affiliate marketing is just someone else doing your marketing for you, but you pay them a commission if you make a sale. So it’s basically getting other people to create content or do whatever they can to push traffic to your website, but you then have a tracking code that whenever the traffic they send to your website converts into a sale, you pay them a commission – a percentage of the sale. That’s affiliate marketing.

Email Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel

Another digital marketing channel is email marketing, which is very, very effective for customer retention. Although you can use email marketing for customer acquisition, you will want to focus your email marketing on retaining your existing customers by engaging them with content.

Email marketing is very unique because when people go on social media platforms, Google search, or whatever, they’re presented with different options. But with email marketing, you can really target your customer. It’s a form of one-to-one conversation, so there’s less distraction. That’s what makes email marketing very, very effective to retain existing customer and bring down your customer acquisition costs.

Offline Marketing as a Digital Marketing Channel

Another important marketing channel that you should consider embedding in your marketing strategy is offline marketing. You can embed and include in your offline marketing materials your website address, your email and details of other online channels you are using, which can bring people back to your website. 

You should consider various combinations of these channels when you’re looking to start utilising and optimising your digital marketing to get the best result.

There is no one best channel, but the decision on the mix of channels you will be using will likely make or break your business. If you choose the wrong mix of channels, you’re bound to waste your marketing budget. But if you choose the right channel mix that aligns with your target customer, then you’re bound to make more money and ensure the long-term sustainability of your business.